Peru: pacified but not peaceful

After ten years in power, Alberto Fujimori was - controversially - re-elected president after voting in April and May. Disowned by the Organisation of American States, which withdrew its observers, and reproved by the United States, Fujimori won after a second round in which his opponent, Alejandro Toledo, refused to take part. But, with Peru sunk in poverty, ballot fraud is not the whole story. Many Peruvians, reliant on a regime that gives them a rickety structure of social measures only in exchange for their allegiance, and still seeing Fujimori as the man who beat hyperinflation and the Shining Path terrorists, gave him their votes.

During the night of 17 May 1980, the eve of the first free elections after 12 years of military dictatorship in Peru, Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) turned up in Chuschi, a small town in Ayacucho department. “Five people in balaclavas went into the offices of the polling station, and took the electoral registers and ballot boxes and burned them. It started at two in the morning, and half-an-hour later it was all over” (1). This was the first act in a guerrilla war that was to plunge Peru into the two darkest decades in its history: 25,000 were killed, 15,000 disappeared, and more than 600,000 fled to swell the shanty towns of Lima, ironically known as pueblos jovenes, new towns. Close on $3bn-worth of damage was done.

Eight years after the movement’s symbolic head Abimael Guzmán, nicknamed President Gonzalo, was captured in Lima on 12 September 1992, the Shining Path has not really disappeared from Peru or the minds of Peruvians (2). And while terrorism may officially be a thing of the past, Alberto Fujimori is a past master at manipulating the traumas and memories left by the war. On 17 May he was still declaiming at a meeting in Ayacucho, “On 28 May the people of Peru will say No to the Shining Path, No to the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and No to terrorism”.

The pacification of the country has become a rhetorical weapon, and the opposition the target of every accusation that can be thrown at it. Three days before the second round on 28 May, leaflets on which the Possible Peru opposition party’s candidate, Alejandro Toledo, appeared in a scarf and cap bearing the logo of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) (3) were circulating north of Ayacucho, in Huanta and La Mar provinces. These are coca-growing areas where the guerrilla war was especially bloody. “Violence, killing, war and corpses. Voting for Toledo is voting for terrorism.”